Perl gratitude, 2007

Here in the US, it's Thanksgiving, a day of eating lots of food,
watching football, and sometimes, just sometimes, expressing gratitude
and giving thanks for those things that make life wonderful.

Here are the things I'm grateful for in late 2007, in no
particular order after the first.

Google Code

Google's project hosting
service has been a godsend. It's changed the way I do open
source projects. It has leapfrogged SourceForge for ease of
maintenance, and the bug tracker trumps RT
for CPAN that we've been using for so long. Add that to the
integration with Google Groups which makes it trivial to create
mailing lists, and it's at the tops of my list for 2007. I can't
say enough good about it.

The readers of Perlbuzz

Eleven weeks ago, Skud and I started this little website called
Perlbuzz as an alternative to
the "more traditional outlets" for news in the Perl world. The
response has been tremendous. We get 600 RSS readers every day,
and have had over 10,000 unique visitors in that time. It makes
me happy that our little venture is used and appreciated by the
community.

Test::Harness 3.0

It's been over a year in the making, but the new version of the crucial
Test::Harness 3.0 means more flexibility for module authors, and
lots of UI improvements for people who just want to run prove
and make test.

Mark Dominus

MJD is so much a fixture in Perl it's easy to forget that he's
there. For 2007, though, never mind all the things he's done for
Perl in the past, or the hours I've spent being enthralled in talks
of his. His Universe Of Discourse
blog is the single most intelligent blog out there, and sometimes
it just happens to be about Perl.

Andy Armstrong

Was Andy Armstrong always around, or did I just not notice? His
time and dedication spent on climbing on board with Ovid and Schwern
and the rest of the Test::Harness 3.0 crew has been invaluable in
getting it out. Plus, he's a really swell guy anyway.

Dave Hoover

When I finally despaired of the amount of time and frustration
it took to organize content for Chicago.pm's Wheaton meetings,
Dave Hoover stepped up and volunteered to take it over. I'm thankful,
but not as much as I hope the other Chicago.pm folks are.

Perl::Critic

I'm all about having the machine keep an eye out for the stupid things
we do, and the goodness of Perl::Critic
is always impressive. You won't like everything Perl::Critic says about your code,
but that's OK. It's an entire framework for enforcing good Perl
coding practices.

The Perl Community in general

The Perl community is populated by some tremendous folks. Some
names are more known than others, but these people help make daily
Perl life better for me. In no particular order, I want to single
out Pete Krawczyk, Kent Cowgill, Elliot Shank, Liz Cortell, Jason
Crome, Yaakov Sloman, Michael Schwern, Andy Armstrong, Ricardo
Signes, Julian Cash, Jim Thomason, chromatic, Chris Dolan, Adam
Kennedy, Josh McAdams and of course Kirrily Robert. If you think
you should be on this list, you're probably right, and I just forgot.

My wife, Amy Lester

Because even if she doesn't understand this part of my life, she
at least understands its importance to me.

I'd love to hear back from anyone about what they're thankful for. I'm thinking about having a regular Perlbuzz "Love Letters to Perl" column where people write about what they love in Perl.

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